wayland stability and application compatibility

devsk

Dear Gentooers,

Is there some place where good folks have documented some sort of stability and application compatibility issues with wayland plasma desktop?

I have been thinking about transitioning to wayland on my desktop (amdgpu) but would love to see what is already reported to be broken. For example, if vscode does not work, I am toast!

Thanks,
devsk

turtles · Veteran Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 1655

I've looked into switching in the past,and something about Wayland reminds me of IPV6
both are

Supposed to replace something legacy, some outdated programing, that's really bad code.
100% not backwards compatible, so any commercial support will be slow.
There are really cool talks at conferences why we all need to switch.
And people say the transition is a few years away, and always will be.

The rationale for Wayland was mobile and tablet device development but it seems to me SurfaceFlinger has a better chance of taking over before Wayland does.
In the mean time x11-xorg and IPV4 keep chugging away.
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devsk · Posted: Tue Dec 14, 2021 3:32 am Post subject:

devsk · Posted: Wed Dec 15, 2021 8:26 am Post subject:

I think these showstoppers were enough to persuade me to abandon this idea for now. I will try in another year or so.

https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers

and

https://hansdegoede.livejournal.com/21944.html

I definitely need KDE session restore. That's a big showstopper right there!

I do run graphical tools as root sometimes because I need to e.g. I need to diff and merge a system file, my tool of choice is always kdiff3 (it has never failed me).

turtles · Veteran Joined: 31 Dec 2004 Posts: 1655

Interesting thanks for posting.
Yeah with more and more 'closed source' apps getting run on Linux desktops the security threat is real.

I have been meaning to try out dockercast:
https://github.com/dockercask/dockercask
Or something like it.
I am not sure if there is anything Gentoo specific.
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stef999 · n00b Joined: 12 Sep 2021 Posts: 4

devsk · Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2021 3:52 am Post subject:

dmpogo · Advocate Joined: 02 Sep 2004 Posts: 3267 Location: Canada

devsk · Posted: Tue Dec 21, 2021 9:24 am Post subject:

davydm · n00b Joined: 06 Jan 2017 Posts: 73

After reading https://write.as/n5r0vjolumdnuk2k.md, linked from Hacker News, I thought perhaps it was time to consider Wayland again. Prior musings in this direction have always ended with "not yet".

Wayland is pushed as the next best thing, but the hard reality seems to be to the contrary, especially if you're running an nvidia system (https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=ubuntu-2104-gaming&num=1 , https://blog.devgenius.io/wayland-and-nvidia-in-2022-2f0407fb34f4). The first article linked here claims that Wayland is the default on so many distros, but the reality is probably closer to what I see about it being the "default" on Ubuntu - it's "default" except on nvidia, because there are too many issues.

Not to mention the KDE showstoppers (https://community.kde.org/Plasma/Wayland_Showstoppers).

I wouldn't mind being proven wrong, but it looks like globally setting the `wayland` use flag and rebuilding will be a lot of compilation for little benefit and a brand new collection of issues.

devsk · Posted: Fri Jan 21, 2022 10:09 pm Post subject:

Yeah, too many showstoppers at this time. The progress seems very slow but hopefully, KDE is pushing hard for them to be resolved in 2022 roadmap for plasma.

Goverp · Veteran Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 1998

I've just tried wayland again; it seemed a lot better at first - to the extent that I had to check if it was actually wayland and not X! However, zoom is still broken. kmail windows now "twitch" rather than fail to appear. But the biggest problem was that KDE "Switch to new user", which goes via sddm (X11 only AFAIK), is broken and locks me out of both the intended new user session AND the existing one. So, back to X for me at the moment.
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Greybeard

Perfect Gentleman · Veteran Joined: 18 May 2014 Posts: 1248

I've been using KDE Wayland session like more than for a year.

Anon-E-moose · Posted: Sat Jan 22, 2022 2:30 pm Post subject:

sddm does have problems with wayland (though they're being worked out) but since it was originally based on X11, it still is its primary focus, wayland is an addon at the moment. Having said that they have 19.0 version out that might improve things (I don't use sddm)

Typically one would use greetd with one of the greeters for a better wayland experience, though I'm not sure how well they interface with straight X11.

Afa kde, that's a work in progress re. the wayland part of it. Each release, major or point fixes some problems (but they got lots of them

)

Wayland is also a work in progress, much like X11 was in the late 90's/early 2000's.
As far as being default vs X11, that depends on the distro, and major vendors gnome/kde allow you to go either way, usually with env variables.
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mv · Watchman Joined: 20 Apr 2005 Posts: 6747

I have no problem with wayland so far.
However, I use wayfire (not kde), no zoom (though meet w/ google-chrome [in wayland mode] and discord-bin), and meanwhile I have no longer any machines with nvidia.
I do use sddm-0.18.1, however, and have no problems logging in and out.
OTOH, I have not tried this with systemd yet (though I use systemd instead of elogind since I want to be able to switch init systems if necessary), and sddm is the only package compiled with pam support, so I guess that for most things user sessions are not honored.

Only irritating thing concerning user sessions is that pipewire only works for the logged-in user (I know that this is intentional, but it is rubbish anyway if you do not want that misfeature.) Anyway, I guess that the latter has nothing to do with wayland.

Goverp · Veteran Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 1998

Slightly necroposting, but,

as of my systems latest update to KDE et al, specifically plasma-5.24.4, suddenly Wayland looks useable. Windows open where they should, icons have the right size. I'm going to leave it as my default for a while to see if there are any stability problems.
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Greybeard

devsk · Posted: Fri May 06, 2022 9:19 pm Post subject:

Goverp · Veteran Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 1998

I assume you mean activities rather than desktops.
I tried logging out with firefoxes open on different activities; on logging on again, they're all in "default", but it was trivial (though an inconvenience that needs fixing) to move them back where they belong.

Having said the icons were the right size, that was my desktop. They're wrong - or at least different to X - on my laptop they're too small by about 15%. Not sure which is right; I need to get a ruler and calculate DPI and so forth! I think it's Wayland still miscalculating on the laptop.
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Greybeard

logrusx · Veteran Joined: 22 Feb 2018 Posts: 1525

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

Font scaling scales fonts, nothing else. KDE Plasma has "Global Scale" in Systemsettings/Display Configuration.

Goverp · Veteran Joined: 07 Mar 2007 Posts: 1998

I found the display scaling thing. At first sight it appears to work. However, I found a more serious issue. I opened a second session with "Switch user". That worked fine until I made the mistake of trying to switch back using Ctl+Alt+F7. That gave a black screen with an X cursor, both there and back on Ctl+Alt+F8, so I couldn't get back in without a reboot. Back to Xorg!
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Greybeard

logrusx · Veteran Joined: 22 Feb 2018 Posts: 1525

devsk · Posted: Sun May 08, 2022 8:24 am Post subject:

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8935

logrusx · Veteran Joined: 22 Feb 2018 Posts: 1525